Abstract:

Well designed graphical user interfaces are critical to the effective performance of today’s interactive systems in many domains. However, achieving a really good graphical user interface involves quite complex tasks. One of the most important points is to think about the requirements how the interface has to appear and how to behave. Due to the importance of user-friendliness of graphical user interfaces and easy-to-use interfaces these requirements highly concern software-ergonomic aspects, and are mostly non-functional. Thus, the design of a graphical user interface has to arise in an application specific and as well as for the user comfortable manner. In this paper we will investigate how such software-ergonomic aspects can be integrated in the specification process of graphical user interfaces. More precisely, we consider, how the process of specifying software-ergonomic features of graphical user interfaces can be carried out continuously within a constructive interplay between the requirements stage and the design stage. This continuity can be achieved by using a flexible and powerful specification method. We use graph grammars as a means to specify intuitively and at the same time formally as well.